Slitherine

quote:

ORIGINAL: wargamer123

Interestingly Enough, the topic was brought up why the Russians could be starved in GOA, would make sense. I found a site I found most interesting, explaining the LandLords Kulaks and the Serf-peasants. The relationship between the two and the corruption.. It's not as if there wasn't enough grain to feed Russia, the site I found explained that the Kulaks saw WW1 as an opportunity to get rich and thus aided in the starvation of the Russian People. I wonder if this is the precise reason? Though it does make sense why one could more easily collapse the Russians with capturing Food Hexes and by pushing on the war.

Germany and the UK not the only 2 nations vulnerable to starvation

Anyway, the site quoted,

"Kulaks: The Russians that prospered the most during the war were peasant land-owners: Kulaks. Cunning muzhiks bribed local officials to prevent conscription and saw a field of opportunity open up during the war. While more and more peasants were sent to their deaths on the front lines, kulaks grabbed up their land in a free-for-all. By 1917, kulaks owned more than 90% of the arable land in European Russia, where once the majority or arable land had been in the hands of peasant communes.

The most valuable commodity throughout the war was grain, and kulaks understood this with absolute clarity: food prices climbed higher than any other commodity during the war. In 1916, food prices accelerated three times higher than wages, despite bumper harvests in both 1915 and 1916. The price of grain in 1916, already at two and a half rubles per pud, was anticipated to raise up to twenty five rubles per pud. Hoping to raise prices, the kulaks hoarded their food surplus.

Throughout 1916, the average urban labourer ate between 200 and 300 grams of food a day.

In 1917, the urban populations of Russia were allowed to buy only one pound of bread per adult, per day. In practice, workers sometimes went days without food. As a result of the Land Decree of October 26, 1917, when the peasants took back their land from the kulaks, food slowly came back into the cities again. Though the Kulaks were overwhelmed by the peasants at home and those returning from the front, many responded later in the year, during the coming Civil War."

quote:

ORIGINAL: talldwarf

I would suggest a more critical reading of your sources.  60 years of communist rule was justified based upon tarring the imperial regime.  Not everything written is accurate.  Similar in many ways the Tudor smearing of Richard III to prop up their own tenuous legitimacy.